The big promotion in the middle of the year makes people itch. Do you have a full purse to buy, or have you eaten soil for days and are still struggling to return the flowers of last month? Looking at so many good things that I want to buy but can't do it, the word "poor" is particularly heartbreaking. Why does poverty not only affect your wallet, but also hurt your brain? The following is a collection of reasons I collected for you. Let's have a look!
Poverty will not only affect the wallet, but also hurt the brain
Wen: Sexy Little ankle
You may not know that more money and less money not only determine what you can buy, but also affect brain activity. Even the impact of poverty can be "inherited".
① poverty makes people overestimate the value of what they buy and are relatively short-sighted in consumption.
② poverty itself will capture attention and make it more difficult for people to get rid of poverty.
③ there are some strategies that can end the vicious circle of poverty.
Poverty makes people make bad decisions when spending money
A recent study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAs) [1] shows that when consuming, people who have experienced poverty before will have very different neural activities from those who have experienced surplus.
In the study, subjects need to complete a series of small games at the beginning, such as the following figure:
Guess whether the number of white dots on the screen is less than or more than a certain number. If the choice is correct, the subject can get a "life", and if the choice is wrong, one life will be deducted. Once life runs out, the game is over. And if the subjects can continue to play until the game passes, they will get a monetary reward.
Subjects need to choose whether there are more or less than 38 white dots on the left. If they make a wrong choice, they will lose one life.
In fact, the experimenters secretly played some tricks to control the number of subjects' lives, so as to manipulate their state of poverty or surplus.
The surplus group has 10 lives at the beginning, and the experimenter will find a way to make their lives fluctuate up and down in 10 throughout the game. If the poor group is unfortunate, they will have only one life at the beginning, and the experimenter will keep them at the level of near elimination.
In this way, the former will always be in a state of surplus resources in the game, while the latter will continue to feel that he is really a poor man.
After inducing the feeling of poverty or surplus, the subjects need to complete a series of consumption decision-making tasks. At the same time, they need to lie down in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) equipment so that researchers can get their brain imaging data at any time.
As a result, the subjects who experienced poverty had lower self-confidence and higher anxiety level. More importantly, compared with the state of surplus, poverty also stimulates the activity of people's box frontal cortex during consumption and inhibits the activity of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - the former is the area of the brain dedicated to coding value, while the latter is responsible for goal planning.
In other words, the poverty state in the experiment changed the brain's calculation rules in commodity value evaluation and consumption goal setting.
The direct negative impact of this change may be that the poor overestimate the value of the goods they buy in consumption. For example, they always feel that what they buy is worth more than it is worth and they pick up a big bargain; Or let them not effectively set long-term consumption goals, but excessively pursue short-term consumption.
Eventually, they will fall into a worse state of consumption.
Scarcity: how do we fall into poverty
In fact, in recent years, many interesting studies have focused on the topic of "how to change psychology and behavior due to insufficient resources". The psychological changes caused by insufficient resources are also called a scarcity mindset by researchers.
The earliest proponents of the concept of "scarcity" were sendhil mullainathan, an economist at the University of Chicago Business School, and Eldar Shafir, a psychologist at Princeton University.
Scarcity refers to a state in which what people "have" can't meet "what they need", whether it's money, food or time. The most classic experiment of the combination of economists and psychologists was published in science.
In the task, subjects need to complete a series of games, which may win or lose money. They need to maintain a certain amount of money to ensure that the game can continue. For the subjects with bad luck and fund problems, the task also carefully prepared an emergency plan - high interest rate lending.
Easing the financial pressure through high interest rate lending is tantamount to robbing Peter to pay Paul, which will worsen the individual's financial situation in the long run. However, in the experiment, subjects who were manipulated as poor were more likely to borrow such high interest loans than those who were manipulated as rich.
This behavior led to their financial situation continued to decline throughout the game, and finally eliminated one after another.
The reason why Munson believes that poor people do not have equal opportunities to deal with other social issues is not that they do not have enough attention to deal with poverty, but that they do not have enough attention to deal with other social issues.
Just like the poor in the experiment, they pay too much attention to the current capital situation and ignore the high cost of excessive borrowing in the future.
People who only care about how to pay their next bill rarely think about what to invest in the future; A person on the verge of a task deadline will only be dragged down by what seems most urgent and give up a job that is more valuable to them.
Poverty can only teach people how to be poor
It has a negative impact not only on the poor, but also on real life.
In the summer of 2010, mulanathan and Shafir conducted a field study in rural southeast India [3]. They compared the cognitive abilities of 464 Indian sugarcane farmers before harvest (scarce state) and after harvest (surplus state).
They found that farmers in scarcity scored significantly worse on Raven's reasoning (IQ) test than they did in affluence. Moreover, in terms of tasks related to cognitive control ability, farmers in scarcity take longer to complete the tasks correctly.
Moreover, the greater the economic pressure, the worse the performance of farmers in the two tasks.
This field experiment shows us a clear fact that in reality, people in scarcity still have a relatively low level of intelligence and control. However, compared with people in normal situations, these people need to make more efforts to change their scarcity.
Scarcity not only damages the quality of people's decision-making in the short term, but also causes long-term intergenerational transmission.
In 2015, the largest current study on brain development of poverty and children included brain imaging data of 1099 adolescents aged 3 to 20. The results were published in nature neuroscience.
The study found that children growing up in poor families have smaller brain regions responsible for language, reading, executive control and memory. Moreover, the poorer the family, the greater the gap between these brain regions and children from normal families.
Language, reading, executive control and memory are crucial to the success of their studies and work in the future. However, this "congenital deficiency" of brain development makes their starting line far from others. This study tells us a more pessimistic fact: poverty can only teach people how to be poor.
How to reduce the sense of scarcity and prevent poverty?
Scarcity has a huge impact on the poor and can even be "inherited", but fortunately, many organizations around the world are carrying out or will soon carry out anti-poverty actions. The United Nations also puts "poverty eradication" at the top of its 17 sustainable development goals [6].
At present, one of the two well-known poverty alleviation institutions in the world is the jamir Poverty Action Laboratory (j-pal) established by mulenasen and two other economists in 2002. Together with many other researchers, they have put forward many effective anti-poverty strategies.
On the one hand, we can increase the cognitive leisure of the poor to make up for their over consumed attention. For example, delete redundant process content in daily work, or simplify work procedures [2], or artificially set up some reminders to guide the poor to focus on the future.
On the other hand, by reducing the economic fluctuations of the poor, we can try our best to avoid the interference of scarcity on their decision-making, such as providing them with unconditional cash assistance to alleviate capital fluctuations in extraordinary times, or cultivating the poor to form a good habit of saving.
In addition, the researchers also specially designed courses and training suitable for low-income families, especially children. Through systematic training, children from low-income families can comprehensively improve their cognitive ability.
Compared with traditional strategies, the biggest highlight of these strategies is that they all start from the individual level, especially from the perspective of improving individual cognitive ability to combat poverty, that is, poverty alleviation must support intelligence.
With the help of these strategies, more and more low-income groups have improved their poverty status, and more people will benefit from it in the future.